Oct 10 2008
Where’s the Love?
Last week there was a post at College Web Guy about being *bored* with analytics. The gist of the post was that while analytics is important, it should always come second to great content, design, and so on. I do understand that the post was written in jest, but it bring up great points that are worth discussing.
Why do the web heroes in higher education hate web analytics? Ok, that’s a little harsh. I don’t think they *hate* web analytics, there is just a lot of other *stuff* that has to get done. More often than not, the content creator, designer, and developer (the web heroes) are all the same person. That means that the web analytics guy/girl is probably that person as well … and there are only 8 hours in a work day.
I agree that content and design (and all that goes with it) should be first and foremost, but as much emphasis and effort needs to be put into web analytics as well. Web analytics is *not* more important, but it is *as* important.
Content is king. True – but If you don’t have a usable design, the content is worthless. Likewise, if you have no way of *knowing* if that design is usable, or if the content is relevant and readable, it could be worthless. You’re throwing content against the wall and hoping it will stick.
Please tell me you’re not about to mention baseball. I know I’m probably going to get blasted for this comparison, but bear with me, here. I almost think of it like owning a baseball team and not paying attention to the player stats. Aren’t those stats as important as any talent on that team? Stats help build the roster. Stats help create the batting order, pitching order, and help tell you where to put your money. Not any *more* important, but *as* important.
Remember that web analytics is also so much more than looking at visitor trending, bounce rates, and referrers. Analytics is paying attention to user feedback, internal search, video tracking, and offline interaction as well. All of this helps website owners gain valuable insight into the usefulness of their website.
The web analytics community at fault? Higher education website owners might have issue with traditional web analytics because it has always been about conversion and ROI. In my experience in higher education, it seems that they just don’t care as much about ROI as other industries. That’s ok, though. Analytics in higher education is more about usability, about what content works and what doesn’t. It’s about user feedback. It’s about measuring the usefulness of our websites.
What’s great about focusing on web analytics as well is that it helps maintain and tweak the compelling content and useful design. They work hand-in-hand.
The Point. I agree, for the most part, with the issues that the College Web Guy post brings up. Of course you first must have compelling content. That’s a no-brainer. But creating compelling content and design has traditionally been the focus of the blogs about higher education websites. Creating compelling content/useful design is always essential, but it’s time to make analytics as much of a priority.
You can never know if one truly exists without the other.
So my Web Analytics won best in track… so people obviously care about it… How’s that for some analytical data (user reviews) put together to prove my point.
Anyway here is my argument in a nutshell. If you aren’t looking at your analytics then your storytelling and great content is probably not being as effective as it could be. If you are making your request information page amazing, but it is only getting 10 visits a month while your schedule a visit still looks horrible but has 10,000 visits a month then your WASTING YOUR EFFORT!
You have no way of knowing this sort of thing without the analytics.
Congrats, Kyle. As I mentioned on your blog, I was following the conference on Twitter and you were getting rave reviews. Thanks for publishing the slides. I noticed the time on page/site slides. Awesome. I’ve been wanting to do a post about that for a while.
Thanks for your comment here. I completely agree with you. I think the problem with the “content and design” are more important thinking is that as soon as you give into that thinking and not give the same amount of effort to user testing, analytics, and such, that’s the moment you start to ignore it. If we all said, “I’ll get to it when I have time,” we’d never get to it.
That’s why my motto is not more important, but as important. I’m afraid after this post, however, I will have to add that phrase to the banned word list.
Shelby you’ve got me on the baseball analogy. And Tonya said Kyle’s presentation was really great. I just wish I had more time to devote to this stuff. One of the big reasons why I like be a designer has to do with instant accountability. People can judge a designer’s performance by his portfolio in mere seconds. And I dig that, because I’ve never been good at selling myself. Analytics, are great in that way too. The numbers force us to be accountable. The numbers help win arguments. The numbers help justify great content and establish PRIORITIES of content.
But in the end, the numbers only excite me to a certain point. And my threshold is quite a bit lower than normal.
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